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Less than 1 per cent of the complaints received by the financial complaints authority around banking and finance products related to mortgage brokers, AFCA data showed.
According to figures provided to The Adviser by the Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA) for the period between 1 July 2020 and 31 December 2020, the authority received a total of 21,218 complaints about banking and finance products.
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Out of this, mortgage brokers received only 121 complaints relating to banking and finance products, comprising 0.57 per cent of all banking and finance complaints, AFCA said.
During this same period, AFCA received 127 complaints against finance brokers for banking and finance products, comprising just 0.60 per cent of all banking and finance complaints.
In total, complaints about mortgage brokers and finance brokers combined during the reported period comprised 1.17 per cent of all banking and finance complaints, AFCA figures showed.
According to the AFCA Datacube figures, which provides data on complaints by products that progressed to AFCA’s case management stage, a total of 9,460 complaints about banking and finance products progressed to this stage, out of which 20.64 per cent of complaints were about housing finance, 18.97 per cent were about consumer loans, and 7.81 per cent were about business finance.
Out of this, a total of 6,083 banking and finance complaints that progressed related to banks, while 36 complaints (0.38 per cent) that progressed related to mortgage brokers.
AFCA received a total of 1,636 complaints about home loans in particular that progressed to the case management stage, out of which 1,326 complaints related to banks during the reported period, while seven complaints (0.43 per cent) related to about mortgage brokers.
AFCA recently released data which showed that 41 per cent of coronavirus pandemic-related complaints lodged with AFCA related to credit between 3 March 2020 and 28 February 2021.
The complaints authority’s figures also showed that the COVID-19 pandemic generated 15 per cent of financial complaints in the year since March 2020.
The data revealed that 11,482 of the 77,739 complaints received between 3 March 2020 and 28 February 2021 were related to COVID-19., with 1,204 of these complaints relating to home loans.
AFCA also provided statistics for the second half of 2020, which showed that the monthly average for complaints in relation to financial difficulty fell about 35 per cent, with AFCA adding that complaints involving the major banks had reduced.
Commenting further on this, AFCA CEO Justin Untersteiner said: “As the government support introduced during COVID starts to wind down, we are on alert for issues – particularly around financial difficulty – emerging in the coming months.
“It’s vital that consumers and financial service providers work together to resolve issues quickly.”
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